January 30, 2007
films through january
To this point in 2007, through reasons of chance or strange subjectivities, each movie sugarhigh! has seen has been worse than the last. Thus the rankings after one month, with best thing in parens:
6) Smokin' Aces (nothing)
5) Notes on a Scandal (Bill Nighy dancing)
4) Alpha Dog (Justin Timberlake in general)
3) Backstage (Isild LeBesco's facial physiognomy; plausibility of such drecky pop being huge in France)
2) Children of Men (blood on the lens for long tracking shot; Clive Owen's slumped shoulders)
1) Pan's Labyrinth (Spanish Winona Ryder; Harold & the Purple Crayon riff; title better in English)
January 25, 2007
a specter is haunting national poetry month
Words always obscure the face behind them, but the Academy of American Poets has apparently determined that the ghost within American poetry is Karl Marx. A little late to the party, but — welcome!
January 23, 2007
a specter is haunting china
reposted from marxists.org
MIA faces very significant challenges
In early November we came under sustained denial of service attack from Internet hosts in China attempting to exploit a misconfiguration in our server's operating system. The nature and origin of the attack, our previous history with the PRC, and the experience of others suggest that this maybe politically motivated and directed by the Chinese government. Protecting ourselves necessitated rebuilding part of the kernel and rebooting the system remotely. The failure of the system to properly boot into the new kernel caused a prolonged outage as we scrambled to find someone with the necessary access to get the system back into the previous configuration.
Details of the attackers origins [this link is now mysteriously dead — sugarhigh!]
While the attacks continued and greatly degraded MIA performance, we were understandably cautious about rebuilding the kernel and trying again. On January 15, the server became unresponsive and we asked for it to be remotely rebooted, taking the opportunity to bring it up with the new kernel.
While this alleviated the previous issue, it seems to have uncovered another, more serious, problem with our CPU that causes random errors (machine check exceptions) and cause the system to reboot.
Each time the system reboots, it causes our RAID storage system to reinitialize and rebuild, a lengthy process that severely degrades performance. To make matters worse, the redundant disk in the array seems to be failing.
As if that weren't bad enough, while attempting to make arrangements to buy a new server, we learned that our collocation facility will be closing on February 1, leaving MIA literally homeless.
At the moment, our redundant disk is back online and we are rebuilding the array to protect against data loss on the server. We also have offsite backups of all MIA content should the worst come to pass. We are furiously searching for new hosting space, but our data transfer needs (approximately 1.3TB a month) make this a very difficult choice compared with our previous non-profit host.
The bottom line: there is a significant probability that we will not be able to find and deploy an acceptable solution in time to meet the February 1 lights-out date. This means that the MIA will be off the air. We will make every attempt to bridge the gap with the help of our dedicated mirror operators though we may need to stop serving some of our more "expensive" content such as MP3s and PDFs. There is also a chance that our ultimate solution may require us to make a long-term evaluation of the type of content we serve and make things like PDFs available via alternate distribution channels (e.g. BitTorrent). However, despite our recent litany of seemingly fatal problems, the MIA remains a strong organization with a wealth of content, committed to providing the premiere electronic library of Marxist writings. Despite the political, technical, or economic pressures, rest assured that we will find a way to keep these works available to the world.
living all over me
The University of Iowa Virtual Soldier Research (VSR) Program
will be holding its first annual public lecture at the Shambaugh
Auditorium of The University of Iowa Main Library on Wednesday,
January 24, 2007, at 4:00 p.m. The public is invited.
The lecture will showcase the research developments and achievements
of the group, highlighting areas such as predictive dynamics, hand
modeling, posture and motion prediction, and muscle and physiology modeling.
VSR is an independent program within the Center for Computer-Aided
Design of the College of Engineering at The University of Iowa. VSR
conducts research aimed at creating human-like figures in physics-
based environments that are interactive and intelligent. These humans
can predict postures and motions and execute tasks.
VSR has successfully attracted significant external funding to Iowa
and has created a digital human called SantosTM, who possesses
accurate biomechanical and physiological characteristics that enable
him to predict motion and execute tasks unaided.
The lecture will demonstrate and explain the following:
- The application of Santos in the automotive, earth-moving
equipment, military, ergonomics, and safety fields
- Research progress in:
- leveraging game technology for science
- 3D human modeling
- real-time interactive human anatomy
- prediction of realistic human postures
- virtual reality in engineering
- the physics of predicting dynamic motion
- the ergonomic advantage of using human models
- How to partner with and help the program
We look forward to your participation in what will be an exciting and
engaging lecture.
For more information, please visit
http://www.digital-humans.org